Devils Hole, Nevada

The subsurface of Nevada harbors a very special site for the science of past climate evolution: Devils Hole. Calcite is very slowly precipitating from a regional groundwater system giving rise to thick subaqueous crusts coating the walls of fractures. Motre than two decades ago these deposits have been shown to provide an amazing record of climate change over the past 500,000 years. Our project will take a new, fresh look at this site and tries to push the record back to 800,000 years and possibly beyond one million years before present. This will allow for the first time to examine at least eight glacial-interglacial cycles in a terrestrial archive outside Antarctica. We shall also use these samples to reconstruct a history of fluctuations of the groundwater table on these long timescales, thus providing a record of humid episodes in this arid region.